“I want to try and get back down to Chainbridge,” Tim said. “The army set up a big field hospital there. There’s been some Gimmie suicides. They couldn’t handle being saved.”
“Gimmie the winning side,” Elizabeth muttered. “God damn typical, or what.”
“No,” Donrell said complacently. He smiled round at his colleagues. “You don’t want any of that, you want to visit Urswick.”
Tim hated the smug tone, but Donrell was one of the best at ferreting information. A neural nanonics check told him Urswick was a siege town that had been liberated yesterday afternoon. “Any reason?”
Donrell grinned and made a show of lowering a triangle of toast into his mouth. “They ran out of food over a week ago. That means they had to eat something different to last out so long.” He licked his lips.
“Oh Jesus,” Tim winced. He shoved his breakfast tray away. But it would make one fantastic story.
“Who the hell told you that?” Elizabeth asked; there was a disturbing eagerness in her voice.
Tim was preparing a disapproving look for her when he saw Hugh look up suddenly.
“One of the mercs I know,” Donrell said. “She had a buddy in the Urswick support troop. At the start of the siege the infrared sweep showed a hundred and five people in there. The serjeants liberated ninety-three.”
Hugh was glancing round the hall, frowning, as if his name was being called.
“Could be some of your basket cases, Tim,” Elizabeth suggested. “They couldn’t handle the memory.”
Hugh Rosler stood up and walked towards the open door. Donrell gave a rough laugh. “Hey, Hugh, you want some of my sausage? Tastes kinda strange.”
Tim gave him an annoyed look, and hurried off after Hugh.
“Something I said?” Donrell shouted after them. The whole table was chuckling.
Tim caught up with Hugh just outside. He was ignoring the rain, walking purposefully across the mesh road.
“What is it?” Tim asked. “You know something, don’t you? One of your local contacts datavise you?”
Hugh gave Tim a slight sideways smile. “Not quite, no.”
Tim scampered along at his side. “Is it hot? Come on, Hugh! I pool, don’t I? Your best sensevises are down to me.”
“I think you just got your story back.” Hugh slowed, then turned quickly and started jogging along the gap between a couple of barracks.
“Christ’s sake,” Tim muttered. He was soaking, but nothing would make him give up now. Hugh might be a provincial hick working for a nothing agency, but he was always on the level.
There was a four-lane motorway on the other side of the barracks, with a junction right in front of them. Two loops of mesh road led round to one of Fort Forward’s hospitals. Hugh hurried out onto the motorway, right in front of an automated ten-tonne truck.
“Hugh!” Tim screamed.
Hugh Rosler didn’t even look at the truck. He held up a hand and clicked his fingers.
The truck stopped.
Tim gaped, not believing. It didn’t brake. It didn’t skid to a halt. It just stopped. Dead. In the middle of the road. Fifty kilometres an hour to zero in an instant.
“Oh mother of God,” Tim croaked. “You’re one of them.”
“No I’m not,” Hugh said. “I’m the same as you, I’m a reporter. It’s just that I’ve been doing it a lot longer. You pick a few useful things up.”
“But . . .” Tim hung back on the edge of the motorway. All of the traffic was slowing to a halt, red hazard strobes flashing brightly.
“Come on,” Hugh said cheerfully. “Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. Start recording.”
Tim belatedly opened a neural nanonics memory cell. He stepped out onto the motorway. “Hugh? How did you do that, Hugh?”
“Transferred the inertia through hyperspace. Don’t worry about it.”
“Fine.” Tim froze. A glimmer of emerald light was shining in the air behind Hugh. He gurgled a warning and raised his hand to point.
Hugh turned to face the light, smiling broadly. It expanded rapidly to a pillar five metres wide, twenty tall. Raindrops sparkled as they fell around it, acquiring their own verdure corona.
“What is that?” Tim asked, too fascinated to be frightened.
“Some sort of gateway. I don’t actually understand its compositional dynamic, which is pretty remarkable in itself.”
Tim gathered up his reporter’s discipline and focused on the cold light in front of him. There were shadows moving deep inside. They grew larger, more distinct. A serjeant stepped out onto the glistening road. Tim upped his sensorium reception, waiting in awe.
“Urgh,” the puissant serjeant exclaimed in a shrill voice. “What a simply awful homecoming, darling. It’s absolutely weeing down.”
Ralph got out to one of the seven emerald gateways ninety minutes after they opened. The between time was a frantic rush to make sense of what was happening and respond appropriately. It saw the Ops Room brought back to full strength as officers ran in from all over the building to take up their stations.
That the radiant green columns were some form of wormholes was easy enough to establish. The exact status of the people walking out of them was more problematical.
“The serjeants do not contain Edenist personalities,” Acacia exclaimed. “General affinity is a babble of voices, they declaim without adherence to simple convention. Clarity has become impossible.”
“Then who are they?”
“I believe they are ex-possessors.”
By then several serjeants with their original Edenist personalities had come through the gateways, helping to clarify the situation, telling every Edenist in or orbiting Ombey that they were the refugees from Ketton island. Even so, Ralph activated the incursion strategy, drawn up in the weeks preceding the liberation in case a wild foray by the possessed penetrated Fort Forward’s perimeter. All ground and air traffic across the camp was shut down, all personnel confined to barracks. Duty marines were rushed to the gateways. The one thing he had to confirm was that the possessors now in serjeant bodies hadn’t retained their energistic power. Once that was proven, he allowed the full-alert status to drop a level. Both he and Admiral Farquar agreed that the SD platforms would continue targeting the gateways. They might be benign now, but who was to say that would last.
For all its strangeness, the situation was a problem of logistics again. The humans who came staggering out of the gateways were in the same kind of physical condition as every other ex-possessed, badly in need of medical treatment and decent food. It couldn’t be coincidence that each gateway had opened just outside a hospital; but their numbers and rate of arrival were putting a severe strain on the immediate medical resources.
As to the serjeants, the one contingency Ralph and his staff had never planned for was acquiring over twelve thousand ex-possessors in non-threatening guise. Ralph initially classified them as prisoners of war, and the AI reassigned three empty blocks of barracks as their accommodation. Marines and mercenaries on leave at the camp were formed into guard squads, confining them to the buildings.
It was a stall manoeuvre; Ralph didn’t know what else to do with them. They had to be guilty of more than just being in the enemy army. Other charges would have to be brought, surely? Kidnap and grievous bodily harm, at least. And yet, they were the victims of circumstance—as any lawyer would be bound to argue.
But just for once, the problem of what to do with them afterwards wouldn’t be his. He didn’t envy Princess Kirsten that decision.
Dean and Will reported to the Ops Room to act as Ralph’s escort when he was finally ready for his inspection. The closest gateway was less than a kilometre from the headquarters building itself. Even with the marine squads orchestrated by the AI, the area around it was predictably chaotic. Huge crowds of spectators from all over the camp, including every rover reporter, milled round the gateways to snatch a byte of the action. Dean and Will had to elbow people aside to let Ralph through. At least some degree of order had been established by the time they reached the gateway. The marine captain in charge had established a hundred-metre perimeter. Inside that, marines were deployed to form two distinct passages to shepherd the returnees away. One led back to the nearby hospital entrance, the other finished up at the parking lot, where trucks waited to drive serjeants away to their detention centres. As soon as a figure walked out of the shimmering green light, an assessment team decided which passage they were destined for, a decision backed up by nervejam sticks. All protests were simply ignored.